DAW
Expert Reason 11 Advice: How to Save Sounds with Effects
Make Reason’s Combinator work the way you’d expect it to.
Many musicians are content to use Reason as a straight-up DAW, recording audio and synthesizer tracks, adding a few effects, doing mixes, and so on. Reason’s default handling of basic tasks is reliable enough that you can track and mix without ever flipping the Rack around to see how devices are connected on the back panel. If you use the Mixer (F5) to route your tracks to the stock send effects in the default song template, you never even need to look at the Rack (F6).
But there’s at least one situation in which you may need to dig deeper. I haven’t researched the documentation to find out whether this situation is explained. With a couple of thousand pages of manual to dig through, not to mention a couple of hundred tutorial videos, who’s going to go there? So let’s solve the problem here and now and put it away.
The Problem
While developing your song, you’ve loaded an instrument into the Rack and then dragged an effects processor or two onto it from the Browser. When you do that, Reason will quite sensibly tuck the effects away in the Mix Channel device that’s positioned directly above the instrument. This is convenient. But let’s say you’ve got a sound that you like, a sound that includes both the instrument itself and the effects processing that you’ve added, and you’d like to save that sound for possible use later in another song.
Managing this is possible, but it’s not simple.
If you simply click on the Save button on the instrument’s panel, what will be saved will be your instrument preset (including any edits you may have made). The added effects will not be saved. When you reload the sound next week or next month…no external effects.
Well, that sucks. Reason power users will tell you that you need to put the effects and the instrument inside a Combinator and save the Combi patch. Great idea, but in order to get it to work properly, you need to know what you’re doing.
First, you try selecting both the instrument and any effects modules by shift-clicking on them. When you do this, they’re all outlined in blue, as expected. You then right-click to bring up the pop-up menu…and the Combine command is grayed out! Dang.
Okay, so you’re smart. You select just the effects and drag them out of the Mix Channel device into the main part of the Rack, and re-select them along with the instrument. Now the Combine command is available. So you combine them in a Combinator, save the Combi patch to disk, and you’ve solved the problem, right?
No. You haven’t solved it at all. When you try to reload your new Combi, one of two things will happen. If you create an empty Combinator and try loading it, Reason will not be able to find your saved patch in the Browser. The patch is just not visible, even though your computer OS will happily display it in whatever folder you saved it in.
How about drag-and-drop, then? You try dragging it directly from your computer OS folder into the Rack. This does work; you’ll get a new Combi containing your instrument and effects modules. But the Combinator will be wired up in a wonky way that won’t actually be usable musically. (Try it if you don’t believe me.)
The Solution
Rather than tear your hair out trying things that don’t work, let’s go back to the start and figure out where the problem originates. When you drag the effects modules out of the Mix Channel in order to Combine them with the instrument, you aren’t changing the rear-panel patch connections. The effects will still be patched into the Mix Channel’s To Device and From Device jacks (see Figure 1). As a result, your Combi patch, if you save it in that form, contains external connections that Reason won’t know what to do with.
In order to save the Combi patch successfully, you need to reorganize the rear-panel connections. To do that, you’ll need to hit the Tab key to flip the Rack around. After that, here are the steps, in order:
1) Drag the effects module(s) out of the Mix Channel, if you haven’t done that already.
2) Disconnect the instrument from the Mix Channel’s Input jacks.
3) Disconnect the Mix Channel’s To Device and From Device jacks.
4) Patch the instrument’s outputs directly into the Input jacks in the effect (or into the input of the first effect in the chain, if you have more than one effect in series).
5) Select all of the devices by shift-clicking, and use the Combine command.
6) Save your new Combi.
That’s all there is to it. The point of this extra work (which shouldn’t take you more than 30 seconds, once you know what you’re doing) is to make the instrument and the effects a single coherent signal path, with one output. When you Combine them, the final device in the signal path will be routed automatically to the From Devices jacks in the new Combinator, and the Combinator’s outputs will be routed to the Mix Channel’s Input jacks. The patch should sound exactly as it did before, but now you can save and reload it.
A side benefit of putting several modules into a Combinator is that you can easily use a modulation source, such as your mod wheel or one of the Combinator’s knobs, to control multiple parameters on all of the devices at once. But that’s a story for another time.